ANGELUNIVERSITY FOUNDATION

ANGELES CITY (PAMPANGA)

SCHOOL OF LAW

AMERICAN LEGAL
REALISM

Prepared by:

BONDOC, Jaymi Margot C.

CUBELO, Ian Loyd L.
FELICIANO, Jesica Marie L.
HERNANDEZ, Francesca Jade S.
TOLENTINO, Berneth T.
TOLENTINO, Karla Mae C.
 INTRODUCTION
Legal Realism is an intellectual movement in the United States of America that coalesced
around a group of law professors and lawyers in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a theory of adjudication
which posits that what judges really do is decide cases according to how the facts of the cases
strike them and not because legal rules require particular results. They argue that judges are largely
“fact-responsive” rather than “rule responsive” in reaching decisions.

Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes (1841-1935) is considered to be the prime mover of the
Legal Realist movement. During his time, the prevalent judicial practice was Legal Formalism. In
his works, “The Common Law” and “The Path of Law” among others, he initiated the attack to
Legal Formalism.

Legal Formalism is also a theory on adjudication. It espouses what they call “Mechanical
Jurisprudence”. In this type of adjudication, the judge begins with some rule or principle of law as
his premise, applies this premise to the facts, and thus arrives at his decision. To the legal
formalist, cases with identical set of facts will also have identical decisions.

The Legal Realists refutes the argument of the Legal Formalists. To them, no case is
identical because each case is unique. To them, each and every case has its set of facts different
from other cases. Thus, each case deserves to be decided on the merits of its own facts. In
examining and evaluating the facts of each case, the Legal Realist proposes to employ the methods
of empirical science also known as the “naturalistic approach”. They argue that to better
understand the facts involved in every case, a judge must be able to employ the concepts in
economics, sociology, psychology, etc. as needed. Through this approach, a sound decision which
based on facts examined and evaluated carefully through the methods available in other disciplines
may be arrived.

COMMENTS ON REALIST SCHOOL

PATON (A Text in Jurisprudence)

Paton defines the realist school as the left wing of the functional school. The said school is so
broad in a sense that no such group of men exists who agree on defined principles. However, some
writers and proponents of the realist school show a common approach to the problem of
law. According to him, the realist school can be traced from the works of Holmes J. Pound who
saw the the existence of the truth but failed to apply it effectively to jurisprudence. But realist
focused more on the emphasis of the element of uncertainty in law. Also, the role played by the
personal characteristics and attributes of the judge in deciding cases.

Realists, generally, defined law not as a set of logical propositions but in terms of official
action. In other words, “Law is what courts do, not what they say.” For them, until the courts has
passed on certain facts, no law is yet existing. This is in relation with their belief that the opinion
of lawyers is only a guess as “what the courts will decide.” In addition, according to Paton, one of
the most immediate and importance influence of American Legal Realism was upon the legal
education in a way that the methods of law schools in United States underwent change. Classes
were invited less and less to analyze written opinions of judges in explaining what the “law on a
point is”, and more and more to examine the kinds of problems which are thrown up to be solved
by judicial system. In other words, they focus more on the real cases or controversies. This, in
effect, changed the whole nature of legal education. It forced upon law students a consideration of
the interrelations between the study of law and the study of other sciences.

KARL LLEWELLYN

The legal realism movement began in 1930’s. It is not correct to think that there is a single
legal realism movement where in fact there are two principal branches of the movement which
was led by Jerome Frank and Karl Llewellyn. The latter which was discussed above led the fact
skepticism while Llewellyn led what Frank called the “rule skeptic”.

Karl Llewellyn was a scholar of jurisprudence and a major proponent of the school of legal
realism. He was born on May 22, 1893 and died on February 13, 1962. Llewellyn concentrated on
the uncertainty in the actual operation of the rules in appellate courts (power to review or change
the decisions of the trial court) unlike Frank who focused on trial courts and who found the major
cause of legal uncertainty in the uncertainties of fact finding. He wished to make a “sustained and
realistic examination of the best practices and art of the best judges and their judging”.
The rule skeptics branch of realist concentrated on the uncertainty in the actual operation of the
rules in appellate courts. Moreover, it focused upon the appellate courts and the role that legal
rules play in limiting their discretion in decision-making. According to him, legal rules are merely
“paper rules” in reality because they often suggest what is ought to be and not the actual result of
judicial decisions. In other words, facts were the vital focus of legal study and not abstract rules
which dictated a particular result. Law was an empirical rather than a normative science.
In his book, the Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals, he first explained that there exist a
crisis of confidence. This means that there is a crisis in the law that the court themselves have lost
faith in the law. He questioned if there is a real stability of footing for the lawyer.
Secondly, he explained the crisis of confidence. According to Llewellyn, the law generally is
indeterminate in the cases which reach the appellate level of review in a way that legal sources
which are authoritative do not justify a unique decision. Indeterminacy, according to Llewellyn,
arises primarily because of the existence of conflicting but equally legitimate canons of
interpretation for these sources, so the very same legal source could be read in at least two different
ways. He explained it further by giving simple examples. In the United States, courts use and
endorsed two contradictory principles of statutory construction. These are verba legis and ratio
legis est anima which means “a statute cannot go beyond its text” and to effect its purpose, a statute
may be implemented beyond its text” respectively. Llewelyn said that if a court could legally and
properly appeal to either canon when faced with a question of statutory interpretation, in effect, it
could legitimately result to at least two different interpretations of the meaning of the statute in
question. Regarding such cases, the question posed by the realists was: Why did the judge reach
the conclusion he did, given that law and principles of legal reasoning did not require him to do
so? Llewellyn made a similar argument about conflicting but equally legitimate ways of
interpreting precedent, which he called the “strict” and the “loose” views of precedent. According
to Llewellyn, a judge almost always has the latitude to characterize a decision in an earlier case in
either a highly fact-specific way, so as to distinguish it from the present case, or in a way that
abstracts from the specific facts of the earlier case, so as to make it binding in the present case.
Thus, according to Llewellyn, judges are never really constrained by precedent.

The third step is he enumerated 14 factors that are alleged to have stabilizing effect on the
work of the appellate courts.

Institutional or Steadying Factors

1. It is crucial for the judges to be “law conditioned”.

2. The context for seeing and discussing the question to be decided should be a “legal
doctrine”.
3. “Doctrinal techniques” should be employed when judge decide cases.
4. Judges must have a “responsibility of justice” for bringing about just result.
5. There should only be “one single right answer”.
6. The most important is “professional judicial office” which means that any individual who
occupies judicial office have a certain normative model against which to measure his own
behaviour. Such factors are impartiality, uprightness, fairness and susceptibility to
reasoned arguments. The judge is constrained by his own interpretation of professional
judicial office which is more important than logic and precedent.
7. The second most important is “known bench” in which performance of an appellate court
and its constituent members can be studied by lawyers thereby allowing them to discover
ways a particular bench has looked into issues, how it has handled precedents and the
judges’ attitude. In this way, lawyers can prepare prior to arguing their cases.
8. “Group decision”
9. With an opinion of the court
10. A frozen record from below intended to limit the factual context.
11. The issues to be brought the court’s attentioned shoudl be “limited, sharpened, and phrased
in advance”.
12. The bench should decide only after an ‘adversary argument by counsel”.
13. There should be roadblocks for the court as they read and feel their way into the record.
14. Lastly, in order to prevent injustice and corruption, there should be “judicial security and
honesty”.

Furthermore, Llewellyn provided solutions on how to cure the problem in the appellate courts
employing means of science. As quoted, “One concerned with law as a social science, a science
of observation, must center his thought on behavior, on the interactions between the behavior of
law-officials and behavior of laymen."

In conclusion, the rule skeptics within the movement were motivated by a desire to improve
the study of legal phenomena and to increase the degree of regularity in the judicial process.
Llewellyn best expresses the constructively skeptical attitude of the realist enterprise; “But I should
think it a cheap valuation of our wayward, willful, charming Mistress (the law) to think that she
must be kept from comparison, or even scrutiny, lest her charm should fail”

JEROME NEW FRANK

Frank was an American legal philosopher and author who played a leading role in the legal
realism movement. He was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a United
States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He published
Law and the Modern Mind, a book that propelled him to the forefront of the American Legal
Realist movement; and he continued to publish numerous books and law review articles that
developed his ideas about the nature of fact-finding and the judicial process, particularly focusing
on what he came to call “fact-skepticism.”

Rule Skepticism and Fact Skepticism

Frank distinguishes between what he calls rule-skeptics (such as Cardozo and Llewellyn),
who concentrate their attention on the decisions of upper or appellate courts, and the fact-skeptics
(such as Frank and Arnold), who concentrate their attention on lower or trial court decisions.
According to him, fact-finding at the trial court level was more crucial to the administration of
justice than appellate court decision making. Trial courts have the power to evade appellate review
by cloaking their decisions in findings of fact rather than rulings of law. He also insisted that judges
decided cases not on the basis of reasoned and principled analysis of prior doctrine, but primarily
on “hunches.” These arises from an intuitive sense of right and wrong under the circumstances and
used legal reasoning to rationalize these intuitive conclusions

Clinical-Lawyer School

In 1933, Frank called for a truly radical reform to legal education. He proposed not merely
to add practical training to the law school curriculum, but to change the central focus of legal
education from appellate case study to immersion in the day-to-day work of practicing lawyers.
The real laboratory for the study of law, according to him, was not the law library, but the law
office; and there was no better way to implement a realist study of law than “to have such
laboratories inside the law school.” Moreover, what legal education needed was the development
of full-fledged “lawyer-schools” in which “theory and practice would...constantly interlace” and
“students would learn to observe the true relation between the contents of upper court opinions
and the work of practicing lawyers and courts.”
 THE LIVING CONSTITUTION (ORIGINALISM VS. LIBERALISM)

Through the years in the law practice of the United States, there were two contrasting ideas
regarding the approach to the Constitution. These are the originalism and liberalism. The original-
meaning approach to the Constitution considers the written law as legal text. According to the
originalists, the provisions and amendments of the Constitution should mean what they meant
when they were adopted. In other words, the original public meaning of the provisions of the
Constitutions constrains the Supreme Court Justices in deciding cases.
On the other hand, liberals believe in the living constitution. For them the Constitution has the
ability to change in order to meet the needs of each generation without major changes and that it
has relevant meaning beyond the original text. In other words, the Constitution is an evolving and
a dynamic document that changes and adapts over time.

According to Strauss in his book The Living Constitution, the Constitution is like a magical
tree that the tree sits above a parchment copy of the Constitution and suggests that the real
Constitution grows out of and transcends the ancient text. Specifically, he points out that “the real
constitution in the United States is not its text, but a living, growing thing beyond the text that has
evolved through common-law decision making, and that its central features and many of its
proudest accomplishments are judicial decisions.” He believes that the American constitutional
tradition is an approach which is based from common law (precedent and tradition). In the same
way, he mentioned “It is a ‘living’ constitution, but it is also one that can protect fundamental
principles against transient public opinion and it is not one that judges (or anyone else) can simply
manipulate to fit their own ideas.”
Strauss’s definition of common-law decision making is that it is a combination of stability and
adaptability. In other words, it prevents constitutional doctrines from changing too quickly and at
the same time allows substantial change over time. It is based on past judgments and past wisdom
which focuses on what worked well in the past and it gradually adjusts current practices to
changing conditions. On the other hand, he looks at the constitutional text as a not particularly
important in deciding contested legal questions. It just serves as a primarily focal point that settles
certain questions in advance, coordinates political question, and solves collective action problems.

As discussed, Legal Realism was a North American movement active in the first part of
the 20th century. It was related to the Progressive movement. Some 20 years ago New Legal
Realism arrived on the shores of legal scholarship and social science research.
Legal Realism opposed Legal Formalism where ‘legal rules and logical reasoning are central to
judicial decision-making. In more extreme versions of legal formalism, legal rules are the Alpha
and Omega – the beginning and the ending of judicial decision-making’. Legal Realism was in
favor of Rule Skepticism, seen as a distrust of traditional legal rules and concepts as effective
guidance for deciding cases. Realists considered an attack on the rigidity of legal rules to be a
critical step toward better legal decision-making and a more accurate understanding of what courts
were actually doing when they decide cases.

Prominent legal realists, among others, were:

1. Professor Underhill Moore

 2. Walter Wheeler Cook
3. Leon Green
4. Felix S. Cohen

PROFESSOR UNDERHILL MOORE

He introduced the “institutional approach”. Moore believed that judicial decisions often
reflected norms of commercial behavior rather than judicial precedent, and he therefore sought to
establish a body of factual empirical data as the basis of legal studies, hence, in 1929 he was a co-
author with Theodore S. Hope Jr. of "An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial
Banking,"

An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial Banking

Bears emphasis on the explanation and prediction of banking law decisions that "did not appear to
derive from existing legal rules by determining the extent to which the facts of the case deviated
from normal banking practice."

“We observe that a banker, whose customer's note is due and unpaid, refrains from charging
the amount of the note against the customer's checking account until the consent of the
customer has been obtained. What is the situation which called forth this reaction?
Moore defines the situation entirely in terms of "observables". Was the note secured? How did
the note come into the hands of the bank? Had the note just come due, or had it been overdue
for some time? Yet from the standpoint of the banker, these were perhaps the least significant
elements in the situation. The most significant factor from the standpoint of the banker may
have been the fact that the customer's default on the note was obviously due to an oversight,
or the fact that the customer was a man of good credit standing, or some other fact not stated
in Moore's hypothetical "situation."

WALTER WHEELER COOK

A principal formulator of the legal realist school of jurisprudence. He is the founder of the
Johns Hopkins Institute of Law, a research institute devoted to the empirical study of law. He was
A=also among the scientific realists, who were outsiders to the practice of law. Although many in
this “scientific wing” of legal realist thought broke successfully from the dominance of appellate
cases to examine the workings of legal systems on the ground, they explicitly eschewed goals
associated with either law reform or the practical training of lawyers.
Their group brought serious attention to the behavioral study of law required institutional
separation from professional training.
Notable accomplishments:

● Casebooks in equity and allied subjects

● Basic conceptions of the judicial process in all conflicting cases as involving final analysis
the application of the law of the forum

LEON GREEN

Green Presided over changes in curriculum to provide students’ effective training in the
changing field of law. He also determined that the best way to raise the law school's stature was to
raise the quality of students. Green said of the relevance of court decisions in time: "The decision
of a court is no more 'the law,' than the light from yesterday's lamp is electricity.

A leading expert in the field of Tort law, Green authored the groundbreaking treatise, The
Rationale of Proximate Cause (1927)
Green: The Rationale of Proximate Cause
He stressed that the Proximate Cause does not assume easy decision-making, but at most giving
the rational mode of reaching decisions is set up which when properly handled will enable the
courts with greater skill to attain that happy consummation - Finding practical and workable rule.

FELIX S. COHEN

A leading figure in Legal Realism, a legal movement that challenged the Formalist idea
that legal principles could be discerned in the abstract, separate from their enforcement, judicial
interpretation, or impact on society. Cohen's most famous contribution to this debate was
"Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach", which ran in the Columbia Law Review
in 1935 and remains among the most-cited law review articles ever written.

Law is not limited to mean as a body of rules according to which the courts, that is the judicial
organs of a political body, decide cases. But must be put on different terms acceptable to satisfy
certain criteria of adequacy.

● First a definition should capture some of the meanings intended by all speakers of the
language or by an identifiable class of such speakers.
● Second, as a near corollary, a definition should aim at precision by reducing elements of
ambiguity and vagueness.
● Third, a definition should lend itself to consistent employment.
● Fourth criterion is that a definition of "law" should be morally neutral; "law" should be
defined so that the valuation of a law as good or bad always remains logically
undetermined.
Cohen’s Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach

"Jurisprudence, then, as an autonomous system of legal concepts, rules, and arguments,

must be independent both of ethics and of such positive sciences as economics or psychology. In
effect, it is a special branch of the science of transcendental nonsense"
Cohen focused his definition of "law" on the behavior of judges. The realist definition of "law" as
a "function" of judicial decisions-as what courts do' 00-is a consequence of his functionalist theory
of meaning. Cohen also viewed functionalism as underpinning a scientific description of law,
which is purely nonevaluative, he did not in the least intend to disassociate it from an ethical
valuation of law:
Fundamentally there are only two significant questions in the field of law. One is, "How
do courts actually decide cases of a given kind?" The other is, "How ought they to decide cases of
a given kind?" Unless a legal "problem" can be subsumed under one of these forms, it is not a
meaningful question and any answer to it must be nonsense. Cohen regarded the empirical and the
valuative inquiries as mutually dependent.
Lastly, Cohen's thesis, is that, every case presents a court with the question of whether or
not the court should recognize a certain claim, or whether or not some interest should be judicially
protected. What the court does is to recognize or protect, or refuse to recognize or protect, the
claim or interest.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the son of writer, educator and doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes,
was born on March 8, 1841, in Boston, Massachusetts. Holmes Jr. fought on the Union side in the
American Civil War for three years. In 1864, he began attending Harvard Law School, and later
taught as a professor. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes to the U.S.
Supreme Court. Holmes retired in 1931, at the age of 91. He died on March 6, 1935, in Washington,
D.C.
Profoundly influenced by his experience fighting in the American Civil War, Holmes
helped move American legal thinking towards legal realism, as summed up in his maxim: "The
life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Holmes espoused a form of moral
skepticism and opposed the doctrine of natural law, marking a significant shift in American
jurisprudence. In one of his most famous opinions, his dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919),
he regarded the United States Constitution as "an experiment, as all life is an experiment" and
believed that as a consequence "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the
expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death." During his tenure on
the Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, he supported
efforts for economic regulation and advocated broad freedom of speech under the First
Amendment. These positions as well as his distinctive personality and writing style made him a
popular figure, especially with American progressives. His jurisprudence influenced much
subsequent American legal thinking, including judicial consensus supporting New Deal regulatory
law, and influential schools of pragmatism, critical legal studies, and law and economics. He was
one of only a handful of justices to be known as a scholar; The Journal of Legal Studies has
identified Holmes as the third-most cited American legal scholar of the 20th century.
The Path of Law (1897)

When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession. The reason
why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in
societies like ours the command of the public force entrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the
whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees.
The object of our study then is prediction.

Bad Man Theory or Prediction Theory

Bad-man theory is a jurisprudential doctrine or belief, according to which a bad person’s

view of the law represents the best test of what exactly the law is because that person shall carefully
and precisely calculate what the rules allow and operate up to the rules’ limits. This theory is also
known as prediction theory.

This theory was first adopted by Oliver Wendell Holmes who mentioned that a society’s
legal system is defined by predicting how the law affects a person, as opposed to considering the
ethics or morals underlying the law. Under this theory, the prediction is done by viewing the law
in accordance with a bad man’s point of view who is not bothered about morals. Such a person is
unconcerned with acting morally. Instead, such a person would be concerned about the degree of
punishments certain acts will incur by the public force of law.

Holmes believed that the law should be defined as a prediction, most specifically, a prediction of
how the courts behave. His rationale was based on an argument regarding the opinion of a “bad
man.” Bad men, Holmes argued in his paper The Path of the Law, care little for ethics or lofty
conceptions of natural law; instead they care simply about staying out of jail and avoiding paying
damages. In Holmes’s mind, therefore, it was most useful to define “the law” as a prediction of
what will bring punishment or other consequences from a court. The theory played a key role in
influencing American Legal Realism.

Holmes wrote that “a bad man has as much reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an
encounter with the public force, and therefore you can see the practical importance of the
distinction between morality and law”. Nearly every man wants to avoid the disagreeable
consequences of disobeying the law, but not all want to obey the law only to obey it.
This is an often quoted extract from Holmes’ article The Path of the Law:
Take the fundamental question, What constitutes the law? You will find some text writers telling
you that it is something different from what is decided by the courts of Massachusetts or England,
that it is a system of reason, that it is a deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or
what not, which may or may not coincide with the decisions.
“But if we take the view of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws
for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English
courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of this mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do
in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
The Common Law (1881)

Holmes was invited to lecture on the common law at the Lowell Institute in Boston and
from these addresses developed this book. Here the genius of Holmes was first clearly revealed
and the consistent of his thoughts made evident. Holmes helped move American legal thinking
towards legal realism, as summed up in his maxim: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has
been experience”

HERMAN OLIPHANT

He was a professor of law. He started at the University of Chicago, going to Columbia

University in 1922. He was originally from Forest, Indiana, the grandson of William Oliphant, an
early pioneer of that area. Herman grew up on the family farm. In 1903, he graduated from Forest
High School and attended Marion College. He returned home in 1905 to marry his childhood
sweetheart, Julia Sims. In 1907, he graduated from Marion College and then went on to obtain
degrees from Indiana University (1909) and his law degree from the University of Chicago in
1914. Shortly after his arrival at Columbia University, he wrote to the university's president,
Nicholas Murray Butler, outlining some plans he had for reorganizing the curriculum of the law
school. Essentially, his goal was to transform the school into a research center, placing particular
emphasis on the interaction of the law and other social sciences. Under the administration of Huger
Jervey, who became dean of the law school in 1924, Oliphant's plans were used as the basis for a
reorganization of the law school.

He is generally regarded as a representative of American legal realism and is famous for

his statement that the principle of stare decisis is no longer applicable. Although the approach
could be implemented in a time when society was relatively simply structured, in the present age
it should be abandoned. To this effect, Oliphant pleaded a scientific approach. In his opinion, the
way a judge deals with a case can be qualified as a stimulus-response situation, in the sense that
the judge reacts to the stimulus of the case brought to his attention.

Oliphant’s Historically Based Critique of Over-Generalization

Early English law had two characteristics that are especially significant from Oliphant’s
perspective: Life was simpler, and the legal forms were more complicated. When a judge
ascertained and enunciated the “doctrine of a case” in earlier times, he was able to do so in a way
that was relatively specific and definite.
Oliphant bases his normative analysis on three principles:
1. Adjudication and legal scholarship have, through reliance on increasingly general
classifications of legal problem, become detached and remote from everyday life.
2. Some of the valuable policy rationales for a more empirically based jurisprudence have
fallen to the wayside.
 3. More attention should be focused on judicial decisions than on judicial opinions.

A Return to Stare Decisis

The title is noble precisely because “return” to the binding force of precedents would be a
return to a regime in which the holdings of earlier courts - their articulations of doctrine - actually
did bind the decisions of later courts on relevantly similar facts, which was precisely Oliphant’s
aspirations.

SCANDINAVIAN REALISM

Scandinavian realism sought to explain how the law changes the behavior of people. Like
American Realists, Scandinavian Realists are also concerned to explain the law as it is, but unlike
ARs, they are not bothered about the functioning of the Courts. The 4 people behind
Scandinavian Realism concluded three things in common—a) Law cannot be explained by
physical facts alone and exists by the psychological effects caused by certain facts, b) Metaphysical
speculation should be rejected and c) Morality is created by law. Law is not created by morality.

Four People Behind Scandinavian Realism

1. Axel Hagerstorm
2. Karl Olivecrona
3. Anders Lundstedt
4. Alf Ross

AXEL HAGERSTORM

Hägerström is considered to be the founding father of the Scandinavian school of legal

realism.
He rejected metaphysics in their entirety. His opinion was that words such as ‘right’ and ‘duty’
were basically meaningless as they could not be scientifically verified or proven.

KARL OLIVECRONA

Karl was a Swedish lawyer and a pupil of Hagerstrom.. He believed that monopoly of force
is the fundamental basis of law. Despite rejecting law as command, he stated that law consists
mainly of rules about the application of force. Karl rejected the concept of law as command, rather
the law consists of imagined actions from imagined people in imagined situations. He argued that
it is the law that influences morality, not otherwise.
ALF ROSS

Ross follows ARs’ approach and accepts the authority of the court to expound law. He was a
Danish legal and moral philosopher and scholar of international law. Ross made an attempt to
describe the nature of rule by using his description of norms.

a. A directive to do or not something

b. Correspondence of the directive to some social facts

According to Ross. In order for directive to be a norm, it must be perceived as binding-- where
binding doesn’t mean fear of repercussion in case of non-compliance but rather internal feeling of
obligation that the norm is valid. Furthermore, Ross stated that the validity of law lies in the
predictability of decisions. Norms are therefore, observed as law because they are felt by the judge
to be socially binding and therefore, obeyed.

ANDERS LUNDSTEDT

Lundstedt is a Swedish jurist and legislator. rejected all English conceptual theories of law
which are metaphysical in nature.He stated that law is not founded on the notion of justice but it
is based on social pressure and needs of the society.Law is simply the facts of social existence, all
else is illusion. Feelings of justice do not direct the law, they direct the law.

CONCLUSION

Legal Realism has valuable influence in American justice system and around the world. It
opened to the idea that in deciding cases, a judge may not be limited to the set of laws applicable
to the case. It enabled awareness to the value of the facts and other methods how to evaluate and
examine facts which are material in deciding cases. It also inspired law schools to develop future
lawyers by providing hands on and experiential training as compared to purely conceptual and
knowledge based training.